How many times in grade school did you hear a teacher, administrator or whoever say something along the lines of “a good attitude is the key to success,” or “not with that attitude?” or some variation. It occurs to me that your attitude is a symptom, a derivative feature, of your inner existence, like a fever and cough is a symptom of a cold. Whether you have a serious issue in your life, from home problems to depression, anxiety, etc., or not, you’re attitude is your own personality filtered through that lived experience or hardship, a change in attitude is a symptom of that stress. It would be like a cancer patient asking if the doctor thinks they’ll live and hearing “not with a white blood cell count like that!”
This is just a stray train of thought, what do you guys think?
I saw “attitude” and “grade school” and it just reminded me of being AFAB and getting scolded for having “an attitude” or “being sassy” in elementary school whenever I expressed discontent or disagreed with an adult
It always felt like they were telling us to push down our feelings and pretend to be happy
When I was in grade school, it was almost exclusively Black girls who were accused of having an “attitude.”
For most of my childhood, I was a person with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder. Finally getting diagnosed just before reaching adulthood made me have so many internal realizations about things I had experienced growing up.
Regarding “having an attitude,” I remember once in third grade I was sitting in class and minding my own business listening to the teacher teach. Suddenly she tells me, in front of the whole class, to go outside. I stand out there for a few minutes, and she eventually comes out. She starts scolding me about my attitude, saying it was written on my face, and that this kind of disrespect will not be allowed in her classroom. Obviously this was extremely perplexing to me because from my perspective this was just a normal day, I felt fine, and was just sitting in class like I always had.
If I had to guess why that happened, I’d say it was my flat affect, which I suppose made me look bored. Anyway, that is to say the institution of schooling probably has some ableism problems or something.
